Letters: Longer school days no answer

Copyright 2012: Houston Chronicle

Published 7:38 pm, Friday, March 9, 2012

Discipline first

Regarding "Our students need a longer day to be competitive" (Page B9, Sunday), as someone who began teaching in 1983, and has taught elementary through college-age students in inner-city to exclusive private schools, I have seen quite a bit. There are and have been more educational theories circulating than are imaginable. I don't believe any of them will work until a few simple, difficult, politically incorrect problems are addressed.

Due to our society's love of not holding anyone accountable (other than educators), students and parents realize that if they can get a child labeled with some form of "disability," they can get away with almost anything. Students can tell their teacher, "See my lawyer," and bully classmates and get away with it - with no repercussions. It now takes an act of Congress to remove disruptive kids from a classroom, yet a teacher is supposed to somehow keep a class on task and teach.

I'd bet a lot of money that two of the countries mentioned in this article, Korea and China, are less tolerant of disruptive students and their often enabling parents.

Until we stop allowing misbehaving students to flourish and run the show, fixes such as longer days, more money and more technology are just window dressing to make educrats feel like they are addressing the problem.

My suggestion is for a reality check. Make the lawyers, judges, psychiatrists and professors visit classrooms in various schools and then stop the proliferation of affixing nonsensical labels to kids, allowing them to ruin, and even terrorize, classrooms and schools. Many kids of my generation had oppositional disorder too. Fortunately, the cure back then was not medicinal or catered to by our judicial system.

Legitimate problems do exist, and inclusion is proper. However, if a student prevents learning from occurring, do we at some point decide, societally, that some children just can't function in a traditional classroom?

Prudent people probably understand this. Sadly, our judges and lawyers prefer to create so much red tape that school districts must spend inordinate amounts of time and money dealing with legal issues. If more adults knew what some of their children had to overcome to actually learn, they would be stunned. The parents whose kids are victimized by these little thugs feel helpless because we as a compassionate society refuse to save the majority of our kids, no matter how obvious the need, because our judges and lawyers refuse to protect innocent children and often are willing to sacrifice their safety and education so as to be inclusive.

This obviously is why so many alternatives to public schools are cropping up. The common denominator for any successful school that anyone can mention is simply this: Discipline. If kids don't have to behave, learning will not occur. This is why these judges and lawyers send their kids to private schools.